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US President Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky meet in the Oval Office of the White House. Zelensky and Trump openly clashed a meeting where they were due to sign a deal on sharing Ukraine's mineral riches and discuss a peace deal with Russia. "You're not acting at all thankful. It's not a nice thing," Trump said. "Its going to be very hard to do business like this," he added. Picture: AP / Saul Loeb
Unsurprisingly, the shouting match in the White House this past weekend is being interpreted in radically different ways by those who support US President Donald Trump and those who don’t. But what nobody on either side can deny is the reality that the global status quo has been rudely upended.
Some saw the verbal altercation between Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an ungrateful, corrupt recipient of American generosity getting his comeuppance from the leaders of a country which is tired of giving handouts to the world’s dead-beats.
Others saw it as Washington stabbing an ally in the back in its efforts to ingratiate itself with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom it has cleared of all blame in the three-year-old conflict in Ukraine, which has cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides.
Trump, who has repeatedly proved himself either ignorant of reality, or a man prepared to lie to further his own agenda, was fact-checked by many on the reality of US support to Ukraine. It has not been handing over billions in cash… as many Trump supporters believe. In the main, it was donations of surplus and ageing US weaponry which would have had to be replaced and disposed of.
Nor was European aid to Ukraine, as Trump has characterised it, a loan. It was, as British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer put it, “a gift.”
What Trump wants in return for US support for Ukraine, is to grab half the country’s minerals, in perhaps the world’s most obvious extortion racket. That is how the mafia does business.
So, the clear message from the bully boys in the White House is: Suck it up. We are large and in charge. Many countries must think that with friends like the US, who needs enemies?
NOW READ: Trump-Zelensky confrontation shakes global diplomacy
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